Thoughts on Improving Academic Journals

> Here's another idea, why I'm throwing them out: referees should be given an option to have a larger payoff with a short duration of a referee report -- say, two weeks -- while also agreeing to pay if they don't finish a report within two months, with a fee increasing incrementally each month. And would need to provide their credit card information in advance.

I have to admire the author for having the courage to suggest an outlandish idea.

Nevertheless, what this would result in, in principle, is in crappy reports sent just before the deadline.

In practice, if any journal asked me for my credit card information, I would pointedly inform them that I would have nothing do with that journal ever again. I'm an academic mathematician; maybe an economist would not be so triggered so rapidly?

It seems like the real problem is that there are not enough "soft incentives" for refereeing well. This is, in my opinion, a cultural problem. Journal editors (i.e., the people who request referee reports) are generally among the most respected people in their fields, and so in principle doing an unusually good or bad refereeing job should lead to making an impression on said people. Nevertheless, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to matter a lot.

There are plenty of people who do a good job of refereeing, but it is usually out of a sense of duty to the profession, and unfortunately there don't seem to be as many incentives as there could be to do it well.

Three things I want in terms of format/content:

(i) A single download that includes the article and supplementary information. Some journals are doing this now.

(ii) Articles in epub format - document reflow on my tablet!

(iii) A single download of an entire issue. Particularly desired for Nature Biotechnology.

Some kind of advanced article annotation system with an easy way to add citations + links to other sources would be great.